Why You Should Consider Video Marketing

After you create your own video, you can use it to communicate in ways that other marketing tools don’t. Though video won’t replace websites, direct mail, and trade shows as effective ways to generate and close business, it can enhance these other tools to make them more effective.

You can use video to monitor consumer behavior and connect emotionally with your customers by using a variety of different systems that are both effective and economical for any company.

Online benefits of video marketing

Most businesses now communicate online to some degree, and video is a powerful tool to support their online communication. Sites such as YouTube make video distribution and measurement cheap and easy. Video can help your marketing online in these four primary areas:

Behavioral analytics: YouTube and other video hosting sites provide extensive viewer data that can give you deep insight into the behavior of viewers who interact with your videos.

Conversion: Amazon, Dell, and other online retailers have publicly shared statistics showing that a posted video can increase the odds of a customer purchasing an item by as much as 35 percent.

Efficiency: Software developers continually find new ways to integrate sites so that video messages can be easily shared and broadcast via social media networking.

Search engine optimization: Bing, Google, Yahoo!, and other Internet search sites have made video a key factor in their search formulas. Posting an abundance of video on your website can move you higher in the search rankings — broadcasting your marketing messages to an even larger potential audience.

Emotional benefits of video marketing

Video offers the opportunity to use sight and sound to connect emotionally with viewers via storytelling. Unlike reading material, video content communicates passively: The viewer simply watches and lets the story unfold. Outstanding video entertains and influences viewers by invoking a series of emotions that result from showing images that connect their hearts and their brains with your product or service.

Effective marketing practices bring efficiency to the sales process. Ideally, your marketing program helps attract customers who are predisposed to buy your product or service at a premium price. To increase the likelihood of a solid return on any investment you make in video marketing, never forget that the powerful emotions of fear and greed motivate buyers to take action.

Efficiency of video marketing

The average person speaks at a rate of about 150 to 160 words per minute (WPM), which is half of this page. People read a little faster, at a typical rate of 250 to 300 WPM. That isn’t much space to convey large amounts of information about your company’s story or to describe a product or service in detail.

If the adage is true and a picture is truly worth a thousand words (we believe that it is), imagine the sheer volume of information that video can communicate. A simple 2- or -3-second video image can transmit tons of historical, emotional, and academic information simply from the imagery portrayed in the shot.

Because video has the potential to transmit large amounts of information, every detail is critical. As a video maker, you’re now responsible for every image conveyed in every moment on the screen. Unlike editing a website or whitepaper, editing a video after you post it can be difficult (if not impossible).